Sophia Lai: 'I loved how beautiful the campus was when I first visited.'

Sophia Lai

Troy, MI

Why did you choose Cornell?

I chose Cornell because I loved how beautiful the campus was when I first visited. It was nice to walk down a bridge and be able to look down and see the gorges and hear rushing water. Few schools match Cornell in that department.

What is your main extracurricular activity?

My main extracurricular activity was going to lab each day to run my experiments and check on them. To become a scientist, you can't just bury your nose in books — you have to work in a lab, you have to investigate for yourself. It's important to me because it helped me develop the necessary skills of being a chemist and it made me appreciate chemistry more than a class could by itself.

What Cornell memory do you treasure most?

Those Thursday late nights when my friends and I would work on physical chemistry problem sets. Those problem sets were the worst at the time, but figuring it out felt like a feat and all that time spent screaming about the evils of physical chemistry with my fellow students built a great sense of camaraderie.